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War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention
Ken Roth

Human Rights Watch | January 2004

Humanitarian intervention was supposed to have gone the way of the 1990s. The use of military force across borders to stop mass killing was seen as a luxury of an era in which national security concerns among the major powers were less pressing and problems of human security could come to the fore. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone—these interventions, to varying degrees justified in humanitarian terms, were dismissed as products of an unusual interlude between the tensions of the Cold War and the growing threat of terrorism. September 11, 2001 was said to have changed all that, signaling a return to more immediate security challenges. Yet surprisingly, with the campaign against terrorism in full swing, the past year or so has seen four military interventions that are described by their instigators, in whole or in part, as humanitarian.
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Read the entire essay — a thorough seven pages — from the Human Rights Watch 2004 World Report for January. The PDF has been added to the Source section.
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